Sr Manager Consumer Insights & Strategy

About Us

Trilliant Food & Nutrition is a leading manufacturer of premium coffees and powdered beverages, proudly headquartered in Little Chute, Wisconsin. With a legacy rooted in quality, innovation, and service, Trilliant delivers branded and private label solutions across retail, food service, and e-commerce channels.

Horseshoe Beverage Company, based in Neenah, WI, is a leading ready-to-drink beverage manufacturer dedicated to delivering an exceptional beverage experience. By combining industry-leading talent and cutting-edge equipment, we drive innovation and consistently deliver the highest quality products to our customers-first and fast.

Our brand portfolio includes Victor Allen's, Dutch Bros beverages and Nurri, our better-for-you protein beverage line. We are passionate about beverages - and about building a team that's just as energized. We invite you to explore opportunities at Trilliant or Horseshoe, to see if your talents and career aspirations may fit with our openings.

The Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Strategy will lead the development of an enterprise consumer insights capability designed to improve decisions across brand strategy, innovation, portfolio development, activation, and long-term growth.

This role will serve as a strategic thought partner to Marketing and business leadership while building the foundational processes, methodologies, vendor partnerships, and operating standards required to create a consistent and scalable Consumer Insights capability across the organization.

The role requires a combination of strategic thinking, strong research expertise, business acumen, and a builder mentality. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable challenging a business question, designing a research approach, managing external partners, synthesizing complex information, and translating insights into recommendations for senior leadership.

• Establish standardized consumer research processes, methodologies, tools, templates, and quality standards across the organization.
• Develop consistent research intake, scoping, prioritization, and approval process.
• Establish clear research briefs and expectations for study design, analysis, reporting, and recommendations.
• Build and manage a preferred external vendor ecosystem across qualitative, quantitative, innovation, product, packaging, and other research needs.
• Establish guidelines for when different methodologies and external partners should be used.
• Create a centralized repository for existing research and institutional knowledge.
• Reduce duplicated research and improve leverage of prior consumer learning.
• Identify opportunities to use AI and emerging research technologies to improve speed, quality, accessibility, and cost.
• Partner with Marketing, Innovation, and BU leadership to establish annual, quarterly, and monthly learning agendas.
• Translate business strategies and challenges into clearly defined learning priorities.
• Identify the most important unanswered questions affecting brand, innovation, portfolio, and growth decisions.
• Determine what is already known, what can be answered through existing information, and where new research is required.
• Prioritize research investments based on strategic importance, business impact, risk, and cost.
• Proactively identify emerging consumer needs, behaviors, occasions, and potential growth opportunities.
• Build and continuously strengthen understanding of:
  • Consumer needs, attitudes, motivations, and behaviors
  • Consumer segmentation and targeting
  • Usage occasions and need states
  • Brand positioning and differentiation
  • Brand health and equity
  • Consumer decision journeys
  • Category and cultural trends
  • Emerging consumer behaviors
  • Product and benefit preferences
  • Claims and messaging
  • Packaging and communication
  • Value and price perceptions
• Synthesize research, existing data, marketplace information, and other relevant sources into a holistic perspective on the consumer and implications for the business.
• Partner with Marketing, Innovation, and R&D to establish a consistent 'agile' consumer learning framework across:
  Opportunity Concept Proposition Product Optimization Validation Launch Post-Launch Learning
• Establish clear principles for the appropriate level of consumer evidence required at each stage while balancing rigor, speed, cost, and business risk. Move beyond reporting research findings to identify clear implications, recommendations, and actions.
• Integrate multiple research and data sources rather than relying…